This page explains how to install the foam-extend project on various Linux distributions and Apple Mac OS X. If you have installed foam-extend on a platform that is not mentioned here or had to take other/additional steps for successful installation, please contribute and edit this page or send a message to the maintainer.

The foam-extend project is a fork of the OpenFOAM® open source library for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). It is an open project welcoming and integrating contributions from all users and developers. Previously known as OpenFOAM®-dev and OpenFOAM®-extend, it contains bug fixes and performance improvements, as well as extensions and additional features provided by community contributors (see list below), such as dynamic mesh and topological change support, turbomachinery extensions including general grid interpolation (GGI), cyclic GGI and mixing place, block-coupled matrix support, finite area method, comprehensive mesh motion capability and GPU support. For a full list, see below and previous release notes at: http://sourceforge.net/p/openfoam-extend/wiki/Home/

Version 3.1, nicknamed "Zagreb", is the current version of foam-extend. The release continues the tradition and spirit of the original FOAM code developed by prof. Jasak and Mr. Weller during their time at Imperial College and released as the general purpose CFD/CCM package by Nabla Ltd. in 2000. In this spirit, we reverted 18 December 2013 to the original numbering scheme (foam-2.3.2, 13 December 2004) as release number 3.0. Visit http://foam-extend.org for more information.

OPENFOAM® is a registered trademark of ESI Group. OpenFOAM-extend and foam-extend are a community effort not endorsed by ESI Group.

In the following chapters and sections is explained how to generally install foam-extend-3.1 and related dependencies, such as ParaView, although you should first refer to the folder doc/buildInstructions/ on the official repository for dedicated instructions for each supported Operating System.

If you installed on a system that is not mentioned on the pages above, please contribute and add it to the respective page.

Get the source code

The recommended way is to get the source code through git source code management system. This way, you can get updates and bugfixes easily by running "git pull". To install into the default location run:

Note: This last line means that whenever you start a new terminal window or tab, you should run the alias command associated to the foam-extend 3.1 shell environment. In other words, whenever you start a new terminal, you should run:

4 First steps

After installing the foam-extend core, the first step should be to create the directory, where simulation cases will be held (this assumes that you have sourced etc/bashrc or etc/cshrc as described above):

mkdir -p $FOAM_RUN

When you have sourced etc/bashrc or etc/cshrc, you can use a shortcut to change to your run directory by typing:

run

You can now explore the tutorial cases, type:

tut

to change to the corresponding directory. To run a case, copy it to $FOAM_RUN and execute the solver application there.

The User Guide can be found inside the folder "doc/Guides-a4/". To know where this is located, run: